In 1933, this supposed baby picture of Adolf Hitler circulated in newspapers in England and the United States. When it appeared in the Chicago Tribune in October 1933, the German consulate in that city denounced the photo as a hoax and provided a real baby photo of Hitler (which I posted on this website a little while ago). The hoax photo came from the London Bureau of Acme Newsphotos and originated from an unknown source in Austria. In 1938, Mrs. Harriet Downs of Lakewood, Ohio saw the photo in a magazine and recognized it as a doctored version of a photo of her two-year-old son, John May Warren, taken in 1932! The photo had been deliberately altered to make the child look sinister. How a baby photo from Ohio ended up in the hands of a hoaxer in Austria has never been discovered. Tragically, the boy in this photo died a few months later, at the age of eight, in a bicycle mishap. Tags:AdolfHitlerbabyphotohoaxAdded: 10th July 2008Views: 2672Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

The beginning of the amazing events at Krakatoa in 1883 date to May 20 when there were initial rumblings and venting from the volcano, which had been dormant for about 200 years. Over the next three months, there were regular small blasts from Krakatoa out of three vents. On August 11, ash started spewing from the small mountain. Eruptions got progressively stronger until August 26, when the catastrophe began.
At noon, the volcano sent an ash cloud 20 miles into the air and tremors triggered several tsunamis. This turned out to be just a small indication, however, of what would follow the next day. For four-and-a-half hours beginning at 5:30 a.m. on August 27, there were four major and incredibly powerful eruptions. The last of these made the loudest sound ever recorded on the planet. It could be heard as far away as central Australia and the island of Rodrigues, 3,000 miles from Krakatoa. The air waves created by the eruption were detected at points all over the earth.
The eruption had devastating effects on the islands near Krakatoa. It set off tremendous tsunamis that overwhelmed hundreds of villages on the coasts of Java and Sumatra. Water pushed inland several miles in certain places, with coral blocks weighing 600 tons ending up on shore. At least 35,000 people died, though exact numbers were impossible to determine. The tsunamis traveled nearly around the world--unusually high waves were noticed thousands of miles away the next day.
The volcano threw so much rock, ash and pumice into the atmosphere that, in the immediate area, the sun was virtually blocked out for a couple of days. Within a couple of weeks, the sun appeared in strange colors to people all over the world because of all the fine dust in the stratosphere. Over the ensuing three months, the debris high in the sky produced vivid red sunsets. In one case, fire engines in Poughkeepsie, New York, were dispatched when people watching a sunset were sure that they were seeing a fire in the distance. Further, there is speculation that Edvard Munch's 1893 painting "The Scream" depicting a psychedelic sunset may have actually been a faithful rendering of what Munch saw in Norway in the years following the eruption of Krakatoa. The amount of dust in the atmosphere also filtered enough sun and heat that global temperatures fell significantly for a couple of years.
Krakatoa was left only a tiny fraction of its former self. However, in the intervening years, a small island, Anak Krakatoa ("Son of Krakatoa") has arisen from the sea. It is growing at an average of five inches every week. This island is receiving a great deal of scientific attention, as it represents a chance to see how island ecosystems are established from scratch. Tags:HistoryAdded: 4th December 2014Views: 182Rating:Posted By:WestVirginiaRebel

I really think Joan did this song in the 60's. This video was from 1975 so I put it in the 70's Saw a concert with her and Bob Dylan about this time. Got to sit on the floor about six steps from Bob and her. They were amazing... Tags:JoanBaezdiamondsrustAdded: 16th July 2008Views: 810Rating:Posted By:Ronnie

A victim of a lynch mob dangles from a bridge, circa 1910. Between 1889 and 1941, there were at least 3,811 known cases of lynching in the United States. There was never any federal anti-lynching legislation passed because southern politicians saw lynching as a necessity to maintain order in their communities. Many of these acts of vigilantism were photographed and sold as souvenir postcards! Tags:lynchingAdded: 8th September 2008Views: 1139Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

The Conqueror is a 1956 epic film produced by Howard Hughes and starring John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. The Conqueror on location in Utah in 1955, Of the 220 actors, 91 had contracted cancer as of the early 1980s and 46 died of it, including stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. Experts say under ordinary circumstances only 30 people out of a group of that size should have gotten cancer. The cause? No one can say for sure, but many attribute the cancers to radioactive fallout from U.S. atom bomb tests in nearby Nevada.
Many people involved in the production knew about the radiation (there's a picture of Wayne himself operating a Geiger counter during the filming), but no one took the threat seriously at the time.
Howard Hughes was said to have felt "guilty as hell" about the whole affair, although as far as I can tell it never occurred to anyone to sue him. For various reasons he withdrew The Conqueror from circulation, and for years thereafter the only person who saw it was Hughes himself, who screened it night after night during his paranoid last years. Tags:TheConqueror-TakesManyLivesIncludingJohnWayneAdded: 16th September 2008Views: 827Rating:Posted By:pfc

Regulars on this website know that I love this old show. (My 300-plus WML posts attest to this!) The original CBS version of What's My Line aired Sunday nights at 10:30 from February 2, 1950 to September 3, 1967. I was just three years old when it went off the air so I never saw WML during its glory days (although I frequently watched the syndicated 1968-75 version). To make up for what I missed, I've been reading everything I can about this great slice of Americana. In the comment section below, I'll be listing some esoteric facts--trivia, if you like--about this supremely classy game show. By the way, this is a publicity photo of the WML gang from 1955. Tags:WhatsMyLineesotericaAdded: 23rd December 2008Views: 777Rating:Posted By:Lava1964